Mississippi Sissy (3 page)

“Yes, sir,” said Pimply-faced, who was glad to grab me a little too roughly. I took one more glance back at the boy who had lifted me to his sweaty chest before I was deposited next door in the lounge. “Coach said he'd be right in for him,” Pimply-faced told the three other coaches before he returned to the locker room to collect the latest pile of dirty towels.

My mother had furnished the lounge with fried chicken and macaroni'n'cheese and fatbacked butterbeans, and the coaches had piled their paper plates with the food. The three of them stopped chewing and stared down at me. I put my hands on my hips and stared right back. One of the men, smoking a Winston, resumed shoveling mac'n'cheese inside his mouth next to his dangling cigarette. Hot ashes from the reddening butt flaked away and fell on the floor next to me along with some melted cheddar that did not make it into his mouth. The fear that was now knotting my stomach was not pleasant at all. I folded my arms atop it. The smell of the dying
cigarette, the mama-aroma of all that fried chicken, the countenance of a glob of congealing cheese, the slightly whispered snide remark—“Can you believe this sissy is Ses's?”—that sneaked out of the side of the man's mouth along with a serpentine puff of sickening smoke, the longing I had to be back inside that locker room, the
longing:
It all combined in one queasy moment and caused me to vomit right on the man's shoes. “Shit,” he said, spitting now some of the macaroni on me. He stubbed out his cigarette and stared down at the mess I had made. The other two coaches began to laugh and choke on their food. “Goddamn it. What's so funny?” the man demanded.

My father entered the lounge with his empty RC. I began to cry. “What's the matter, Kevinator?” he asked, kneeling at my side. I pointed at the vomit. “Sorry,” my father said. He grabbed some napkins and, still kneeling, cleaned the man's shoes. “Sorry. He's got a sensitive stomach. He's a sensitive kid. He's sensitive.”

The two coaches ceased their laughter. They frowned at my father mopping up the vomit. “That's okay, Ses,” said the man, lighting another Winston. “Shit happens.”

My father turned to me. That recurring look of sad disdain he could deliver my way stopped my tears. He was even sadder than I was. Then, for the very first time, the sadness morphed into that more perplexed look of fear. I did not take my eyes from his. It comforted me to know that my father, who was afraid of nothing, was afraid of me. I unfolded my arms. I put my hands back on my hips. It was the last time I cried in his presence.

________________

My father was thirty-two when he died. My mother, thirty-three, when cancer claimed her. I was eight. My brother, Kim, was six. Karole, our baby sister, had just turned four. “They called it cancer, but it weren't nothing but a broken heart,” was the whisper that wafted
with enough velocity above our heads during the aftermath of my mother's burial that it could have lifted my sister's bangs with the draft it left in its wake. We had also to endure a plethora of fat-woman hugs. They enveloped us, one by one, these women, with their sagging folds of soft flesh, and scratched our already ruddy faces with the black woolen dresses they had had in their closets since those days they had patterned their wardrobes after Mamie Eisenhower. They exuded an assortment of fragrances: gardenia, vanilla extract, hairspray, Clorox, coffee, a bit of liquor, Lemon Pledge. The mere presence of Kevin and Kim and Karole in a crowded room back then—”KKK . . . ain't that just precious,” was another whisper that always seemed to float about us—could elicit tears from total strangers as well as anything they had at the time in their pockets or snappy patent leather purses: Juicy Fruit gum, a piece of old peppermint, loose change, a handkerchief to wipe our noses. I was given a rabbit's foot at my mother's wake by a very tall man who explained to me that he had played basketball with my daddy. “You need this rabbit's foot more ‘n me. Which one are you, Kim or Kevin? God knows you younguns need a string'a good luck. You've had a heap of bad. Too big'a heap. Look at me. Here I go again.
Fuck
.” At that, he began to cry. I ignored him and wondered what this new word was he had just uttered because Aunt Vena Mae, my grandmother's older sister, shuddered at the sound of it and abruptly pulled me toward her. She was standing nearby, pouring a bit of Carnation evaporated milk into her coffee straight from its little can. I marveled at the word's power, as Aunt Vena Mae's fingers were actually trembling now with anger as she pressed me protectively against her raw silk dress, its tiny nubs rubbing against my face. Aunt Vena Mae always wore a chunky necklace which would bang against her latest astonishing brooch when she moved about. She pulled me closer to her. I heard the agitated clunk of her jewelry above my head. The silk nubs burrowed into my cheek. Something had just happened. Something other than funerals
and tears and the arrival of another plate of food to stick in the refrigerator.
Fuck.
I wanted to know a word like that, a word that could make something happen, one that could push death, if only momentarily, from such a room.

The very tall man, saying, “Sorry, ma'am,” unfolded his body from its careful crouch next to me and walked away. I forced myself from Vena Mae's grasp. She sipped her Carnationed coffee and assessed me with her stare, filtering me through all her meanness. Childless, Vena Mae flared whenever children were too long underfoot. “That's just her nervous condition,” my grandmother would diligently explain. (Venomous Mae was the name I ended up giving her when I was about eleven—a little fuzz on my upper lip—with a wit that had just as shockingly reached its pubescence.) My grandmother was the youngest of nine children—seven girls and two boys—and Vena Mae was the older sister nearest to her in age. They had grown up in the earliest part of the twentieth century (my grandmother was born in 1904) without indoor plumbing. “When nature called we always had to head to the outhouse in pairs so that one sister could shoo away the chickens and roosters in case a bantam got inside the outhouse and pecked at our boodies or other little private areas,” my grandmother had once told me. “Vena Mae and me always made them bathroom runs together. You ain't never seen nobody that could shoo a chicken like Vena Mae. I don't know, there's just a
bond
more'n blood when you grow up with somebody that saves your little private parts from being pecked to death on a December morning.”

I sure felt like one of those turn-of-the-century chickens as I stood there waiting for Aunt Vena Mae to shoo me away with one of her meanspirited remarks. I readied myself. My hands flew to my hips. “You would've thought that both Howard Jean and Nancy Carolyn dying would have straightened you out some,” she finally said, calling my parents rather creepily by their given names while reaching up with her Carnationed hand to make sure her freshly rinsed, tightly
teased curls were staying in place. “You want some of this?” she asked, waving the Carnation evaporated milk at me. “Here you go. Tastes like candy,” she said, handing me the little tin container of the syrupy white stuff. She grabbed my face too tightly in her freed grip, bracelets jingling under my chin. She moved in closer. “You're pretty as a girl,” she said, taunting me with the compliment, then letting go of my face as quickly as she had grabbed it. “Joycie Otis!” she called to my grandmother, keeping up her litany of given names. “Anything I can do to help? Want me to cut up some more cake? I'd have brought my nigger gal down with me from Neshoba County if I'd have known it was going to be this busy.”

I frowned at the latest use of the N-word in front of me, although as far as I could tell it was uttered as often around these parts as the phrases “Jesus is your Lord and Savior” and “Would you please pass that plate of biscuits. They buttered?” But I knew better, knew it ever since I'd used the word in Matty May's presence months earlier on the morning after Sidney Poitier won Best Actor for
Lilies of the Field.
Matty May, our maid, was an old friend of my grandmother's. How I wished my grandmother would have let her help out today like she had asked to do when Matty showed up to hug her neck and weep like a wet baby at the news of my mother's death. “Naw, sugar, we'll just cry too much if you're around,” my grandmother told her. “Come on over the next day and help me clean up all the mess. You can take home some leftovers.”
But if Matty May were here,
I kept thinking,
I'd have somebody to talk to.
Her name became my mantra—
Matty May Matty May Matty May
—as I tried to remain cool and collected because, truth be told, all I wanted to do was turn over all the tables of food. Pick a fight. Do something more than pout.
Matty May Matty May Matty May.
I gripped the rabbit's foot and felt its yellowed intact claws dig into my palm as I surveyed the clacking throng that had gathered in my grandparents' tan-bricked, flat-roofed, surprisingly modernist house way out here in the piney woods on a Mississippi
dirt road. Its bright red front door perfectly matched the red berries that clung to the bushes in the flower beds that surrounded it. I took a swig of Carnation. I looked out the dining room's picture window. Cars were now parked all along the dirt road's sloping shoulder. There was no more room for any in the yard around the countless pine trees that had shed their brown needles into a prickly fawn-colored carpet that completely covered the ground. The needles were great for making walls of forts, and I yearned at that very moment to build one that was impenetrable by all the in-coming pity.

The family's menfolk had gathered out there around the lawned cars, the lacelike autumn shadows softening their faces as the sun filtered down through the bare and long-limbed pines. Two older male cousins tossed a brown pine cone back and forth with Kim who pretended he was Charlie Conerly, an old quarterback for the Ole Miss Rebels. Karole, always at Kim's heels, begged to toss the pine cone, too. A few of the men were in that one-foot-on-a-fender stance that I always saw my uncles take when talking about deer hunting, Goldwater's loss, or “all these outside Commie agitators,” who seemed continuously to be invading our state through my childhood, especially during those compressed and awful months that joined 1963 to 1964. Those months when both my parents died. When JFK died. When Medgar Evers died. When those three civil rights kids—Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman—died up in Venomous Mae's beloved Neshoba County. I watched the breath from the men's mouths fog the chilly air with conversation. A car radio was blaring the news that someone named Horace Barnette had confessed to the FBI about the murders of the three kids and was going to tell them exactly what took place back during the summer.

(That was the summer when my mother was the sickest she had ever been while she lay up in a hospital—Lackey Memorial—which had been built to resemble, rather risibly, an antebellum mansion. As I walked out to the parking lot after visiting my weakened mother
one particularly hot, sticky evening, my grandmother tried to explain how life was unfair at times. “We're not gonna tell Kim and Karole nothing. Only you,” she said. “We figure you're old enough to take it. You're certainly smart enough to understand the situation. You do understand? God just needs good people with Him up in heaven so He's calling your mama to be with your daddy. She's only got another month or so to live, sugar. God's calling her name. He knows what's best. Listen to me. Listen up. I'm more serious than I've ever been in my whole life: You got to be a man about this. A little man. You can't be no child no more. That'll suit you right fine, won't it? You never seemed to like being one anyway.” We reached the car, a black tank-like ‘57 Buick, all grillwork and hubcaps and headlights the size of Cyclopian twins. “So God did this?” I asked my grandmother. “Yes, sugar. You do understand. I knew you would.” She touched the tiny bristles of my flattop. To me God was no better than Horace Barnette. Murderers. Both of them. “Then I hate God,” I said. My grandmother gasped and slapped me right across my eight-year-old face. She gasped again. She placed her hands on the hood of the Buick and steadied herself. She began to cry. I comforted her for hitting me. I was—she was right—no longer a child.)

The radio next door in the kitchen's window that November day of the funeral was tuned to the same station as the one out in the parked car. The women surrounding my grandmother in the kitchen stopped their banter. The men in the yard leaned in, listening. “Who's this Barnette fellow?” someone asked. Uncle Benny, the husband of Aunt Lola, my grandfather's no-nonsense hulk of a sister, decided to speak up. A cotton farmer and contractor, Uncle Benny always wore overalls, even when he deigned to wear a tie as he had that day. He also had on that extra hunting jacket he kept clean in his closet for the occasions when he wasn't hunting. Benny usually hung back from conversation, slyly grinning at everyone else's slight buffoonery. When he did finally speak, his voice was a surprisingly soft high-timbred whine.
“I bet that Horace fella is kin to old Ross, sure as tootin',” he told the men. “Bet the Governor—I can't help but call him that, though, God help us, we just got us a new one—bet the Governor told him to add that extra ‘e' onto his name so's to piss off that littler Kennedy that can't keep his nose out of our business. If you ask me, they kilt the wrong Kennedy. Shoulda kilt both of ‘em while they were at it. We got a deer season and a duck season and a quail season. I say we should have a Kennedy season oncet a year, too.” The other men laughed and shook their heads in agreement. A “colonel” in Ross Barnett's gubernatorial campaigns, Uncle Benny was one of Barnett's staunchest supporters. He had given the clownish and diabolical segregationist Mississippi governor enough money every four years to be awarded with the honorific. Old Ross was such a dolt he once began a speech he was giving to the congregation at Beth-Israel Temple in Jackson, Mississippi, with this: “There is nothing finer than a group of people meeting in true Christian fellowship.”